“Hold your tongue, Markham,” said the orator. “Do you think it is as easy as that? Don’t take any notice of him, my lady. He’s young, and he knows no better. He thinks that if he were able to give up all your estates to the people, justice would be done. That is all he knows. Stuff! we could do it all by a rising if it were as easy as that. You young ass,” the man continued, filling the ladies with resentment more warm than when he had denounced them all, “don’t you see it’s a deal better in the hands of your father and mother, that take some thought of the people, than with a beast of a shoddy millionaire, who cares for nothing on this earth but money? I beg your pardon,” he added, with a smile, “for introducing such a subject at all; but sometimes it gets too much for me. I remember the things I’ve seen. I would not treat lilies in that way, Miss Alice, if I were putting them on wood.” “Oh!” cried Alice with tears in her eyes; “how can you care about a pattern after what you have been saying?” His eloquence had moved her so much that she felt disposed to fling her pattern away. “What can one do? How can one help it?” she said, below her breath, appealing to him with her heart in her eyes. “I don’t like the pattern,” said Spears. “If I were going to put it on wood, I’d treat it so--and so.” To illustrate his meaning, he made lines with his thumb nail upon her satin. “I’d turn the leaves this way, and the bud _so_. They should not be so stiff--or else they should be stiffer.” “They are conventionally treated, Mr. Spears,” said Lady Markham, “and you don’t treat anything conventionally, neither our patterns nor your friends.” She had not forgotten that he had called her son Paul, and “you young ass” was still tingling in her ears. Paul took it, however, with the greatest composure as a matter of course. Spears burst into a great good-humoured laugh. “I beg your pardon, my lady. We don’t mind how we talk to young fellows. I’d have it as conventional, or more, Miss Alice. This falls between two stools. The lily’s a glorious thing when you enter into it. Look at the ribs of it, as strong as steel, though they are all sheathed in something smoother than satin. And every curl of the petal is full of vigour and life. I used to think till you drew it or carved it, you never could understand what that means--‘Consider the lilies of the field.’ There they stand, nobody taking any trouble about them, and come out of the earth built like a tower, or a ship, anything that’s strong and full of grand curves and sweeping lines. Now the fault I find with _that_ is, that you never would come to understand it a bit better if you worked a hundred of them. If I had a knife and a bit of wood----” “Do you carve wood, Mr. Spears?”